The Rising and Falling Tide
Condition of the Parties
FROM 1910 TO 1912, the fortunes of the Socialist party on the national level took a sudden leap forward. Membership swelled from 58,000 to 113,000 during the period, and the party reached what turned out to be its peak with the electorate in 1912 when Eugene Debs polled more than 900,000 votes, about 6 percent of the votes cast, for the presidential office. By 1912 the party could also boast that it had sent two members to Congress and had enjoyed several triumphs at the state and local levels, including more than seventy mayors running largely on municipal reform issues.1
The national party coming into the 1912 election had beefed up its staff and service capacity. The national office grew from a place where the national secretary had one or two assistants to one where the secretary had more than a dozen full-time employees.2 The national party also launched the Lyceum Lecture Circuit, a nationwide system of lecture courses featuring Socialist speakers. In addition, in August 1912 the national office initiated a publication called The Party Builder, providing information on the Lyceum program and other party developments and activities.
Less satisfying for the Socialists, but also a testament to their impact, was the fact that by 1912 many of the proposals they had long sponsored were being included in other party programs. Socialists were particularly hostile to the thunder-stealing Progressive (Bull Moose) party, formed in 1912 to promote Theodore Roosevelt’s candidacy. Among the items in its national platform were direct legislation, woman suffrage, corrupt practices acts, and a host of labor reforms—including the eight-hour day—that Socialists had carried over from Populist days. When informed by reporters that some observers had labeled Roosevelt Socialistic, Debs snapped: “I resent the imputation. We would not take him into the party.”3 Debs argued that Roosevelt was, in fact, nothing more than a tool of the capitalists, trying to head off fundamental change by stealing from the Socialists’ party platform.
Debs worried that Roosevelt and, to a lesser extent, the Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson would siphon off Socialist votes, especially those of the more conservative “parlor Socialists.” Debs and other Socialists also took aim at Wilson, depicting him as a staid creation of university life who “could not stir up a hungry lion with a red-hot poker.”4 Occasionally, Socialist candidates even took shots at the Prohibition party—describing it, for example, as a party that “can only see poverty when there is a beer sign in sight.”5 Throughout the 1912 campaign, however, Debs concentrated much of his fire on Roosevelt. Debs also heavily emphasized education and the need for the masses to think for themselves rather than rely on leaders. As he pointed out to an assembly of supporters in the mining center of Bisbee, “It would do no good for me to lead you to the promised land—Roosevelt would only come along and lead you out again.”6
Throughout the Mountain West, Socialists competed with Bull Moose Progressives for the third-party vote, each tapping a different audience. In Arizona, for example, Socialists did particularly well in mining areas and in places where there was strong support for a host of anti-corporate reforms. Progressives, on the other hand, did best among transplanted midwesterners in rather conservative farming areas and in places where interest in reform meant little more than prohibition.7 A similar portrait of Progressive party supporters appeared in other states in the Mountain West.8 After 1912 the Progressive party rapidly declined in the area, and Bull Moosers moved on, although largely to the Democratic party rather than back to the Republican party.9
Along with the threat of the Progressive party, Socialist party leaders worried about the emergence of the farm-based Non-Partisan League (NPL). This organization came to life in North Dakota in 1910 after the legislature failed to follow up on a voter-approved referendum authorizing the state to construct a terminal grain elevator. A former organizer for the Socialist party, Arthur C. Townley, headed the new organization and built a league program that was avowedly Socialistic. The NPL called for state ownership of various enterprises, such as terminal elevators and flour mills, and other benefits of particular interest to farmers. Townley regularly spoke in terms of the class struggle and condemned business interests. Townley, though, rejected the third-party route as unproductive and, as an alternative, advised his followers to capture the machinery of one of the major parties as a means of winning elections and eventually turning the league’s program into law. In 1912 a report by John Spargo to the National Executive Committee (NEC) noted that the list of organizers of the NPL “reads like a list of present and past members of the Socialist party.”10 Spargo looked upon the NPL as a menace to the Socialist party generally and as a particular threat—already beginning to materialize—in states such as Colorado, Idaho, and Montana, where, if unabated, agrarian and industrial radicals might end up in separate and rival organizations.11
In 1912 Socialists fought not only with Republicans, Democrats, Progressives, Prohibitionists, and Non-Partisans but, as always, with each other. The principal rift was between the left and right wings of the party, and often at the center of the controversy was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which had become the most feared labor organization in the United States. Bill Haywood had taken a new interest in the increasingly radical organization and in 1911 began to travel the country serving the IWW as well as the Socialist party. In a speech given in New York in December 1911, he made it clear that he was a rebel who favored the overthrow of the capitalist system, by force if necessary. He declared that there was nothing wrong with a little sabotage in the right place and at the right time and was proud of the fact that he was not a law-abiding citizen. Haywood claimed no Socialist could be a good citizen, since by definition he or she was dedicated to overthrowing the system.12
Other IWW leaders followed Haywood in shunning politics and emphasizing direct action techniques on the industrial front, such as strikes, slowdowns, and sabotage, toward the broader goal of replacing the present system with a society run by labor through one big union. The IWW’s extreme direct action tactics aroused the fear of many Americans, creating, as economists Harry A. Mills and Royal E. Montgomery noted, an image of “a mysterious, incalculable force, likely to appear any time and work destruction.”13 Fear of the IWW increased after its substantial 1912 victory in leading a strike by around 25,000 workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, although it failed not long after in leading a strike among silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey. Coming into the 1912 election, Socialist party leaders saw a bright future for the party if they could just dump the IWW—it had gotten in the way of the party’s ability to focus on the political fight, made it difficult to form ties with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and, because of its violent image, threatened the radical cause.
While 250 delegates were gathering for the opening day of the Socialist party’s national convention in Indianapolis in May 1912, conservative party leaders told reporters they were going to demand that the convention denounce the IWW and its violent direct action principles. “The Socialist party,” Victor Berger declared, “cannot afford to continue to be embroiled with this riotous organization.”14 To right-wingers, led by Morris Hillquit and Berger, the IWW stood in the way of building a respectable Socialist party that sought power both by working within the AFL and through conventional political means.
During the convention a direct attack on IWW types came in the form of a proposed amendment to the party’s constitution, Article 2, Section 6, which stipulated: “Any member of the party who opposes political action or advocates crime, sabotage or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation shall be expelled from membership in the party.” The motion sailed through the 1912 convention, but leftists successfully petitioned to have the matter settled by a vote of the entire membership. Conservatives claimed they welcomed this vote, confidently predicting that the membership was on their side and that the vote would further drive home the point that the Socialist party stood squarely against violence in the emancipation of the working class.15 When the vote came, more than 75 percent of members voting approved the anti-sabotage amendment.
Haywood, however, continued to speak out in favor of sabotage and direct action. Conservatives reacted by initiating a campaign to have Haywood removed from the NEC. Haywood, the right argued, had put the party in a situation of “constant necessity of explanation and apology” and, by his open advocacy of sabotage, had violated the newly adopted provision in the party constitution.16 In a national referendum, 2 of every 3 of the 23,000 party members voting approved recalling Haywood from the NEC. The ouster may have prompted many of the more radical types to leave the party, particularly hurting membership levels of state and local parties in the Mountain West. By one estimate, the party as a whole lost between 30,000 and 40,000 workers in 1913, largely because of the policy changes directed against the IWW and Haywood.17 By another count, between 1912 and 1918 the party lost almost 23,000 members, many as a result of this fight.18 Among others ousted for similar activity was David Coates, who at the time was living in Spokane. Although perhaps slightly more to the left, the attitudes of Socialist party leaders in the Mountain West regarding the IWW differed little from those of national party leaders on the Haywood question—tensions between Wobblies and Socialists in several places, including Butte, were at a high level. Relations grew worse after the party’s expulsion of Haywood.
Meanwhile, even though Debs did better than ever, many radicals in the Mountain West and elsewhere were disappointed by the 1912 election returns. Some had expected much more and blamed Theodore Roosevelt, who gathered more than 4 million votes, for cutting the size of Debs’s vote.19 There was also considerable debate among radicals over the motives of the 900,000 people who did vote for Debs and, related to this, over bringing these people into the party. One line of thought was that they were not so much voting for Socialism or even for Debs as they were protesting the other parties. Debs, on the other hand, saw them as clear-cut Socialist votes from dedicated revolutionary Socialists.20 Those who shared Debs’s assumption that the people who voted for him were voting for Socialism saw the possibility of adding a large number of party members (see Appendix, Table 6). They were struck, however, by the party’s apparent unwillingness or inability to do so. The editor of Miners Magazine complained, “We pour money into propaganda in an increasing stream, win over multitudes of voters and then fail to follow up our work by getting our voters into the party.”21 Some argued that the country was still filled with Socialists but that they preferred to operate as “individual bushwhackers” because they saw no value in joining a Socialist party organization.22 Thus, it was up to the party to give members activities that made membership worthwhile and gave them a feeling of accomplishment they could not get on their own. Just what those activities were and whether the party should move in that direction, however, were matters of considerable debate. Indeed, not only did the party fail to bring in new members, it rapidly lost old members because, as noted earlier, of the IWW split. Within a year the loss of dues-paying members forced it to suspend publications such as The Party Builder because of a lack of funds.
On the campaign trail in 1912, the former Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, Emil Seidel, running as his party’s vice presidential candidate, told an audience in Missoula that fifteen or twenty years ago Socialists had received a far less positive response than he and Debs were now receiving: “Then those who were bold enough to make a socialist speech very often had to clean their clothes of stale eggs or decaying vegetables. They don’t throw eggs any more.” The vice presidential candidate, in good humor, admitted that this may have had less to do with an increase in the stature of Socialist candidates than with the increased cost of living, making eggs—even rotten ones—far too expensive to throw away.
In a more mellow tone, one reflecting the uphill struggle the party was facing, Seidel remarked, “If we as a party are never able to do anything else we have at least succeeded in arousing the people to the great social evils which beset them and have suggested a remedy for their correction. If we never do anything else this much has been well worthwhile.”23 The party press noted: “Seidel is becoming so well known that he is detected everywhere and approached by many who are interested in Socialism and anxious to know more about it. This is especially true of the traveling men who make [up] a large part of the cargo of every train traveling the Rocky mountain and Pacific coast states.”24
Seidel teamed up in 1912 with other national campaign orators such as George H. Goebel and Walter I. Millard and the Socialist mayor of Berkeley, California, J. Stitt Wilson.25 Also campaigning in the Mountain West was Caroline A. Lowe—Canadian-born, former schoolteacher, and ardent suffrage worker as well as a Socialist. According to a party source: “Miss Lowe’s method of converting people to Socialism is ingenious and shows a high grade of individuality. When she meets a non-Socialist, she transfixes him with her gaze, points the index finger of her right hand at the pupil of his left eye, and imperiously seethes the word: ‘Listen!’ He listens. And she never lets the poor devil go until he promises to be a good Socialist.”26
Socialists in the Mountain West, like Socialists elsewhere, were swept up in the excitement of the 1912 election. They made gains in much of the region, sometimes causing conservative forces considerable alarm. A backlash caused by the Socialists’ success helped bring them back down to earth by 1913. They looked inward, spending much of their time fighting among themselves and pondering problems of organization and support.
In Colorado the party’s gains were less spectacular than those in much of the region: Socialist party candidates received about 6 percent of the vote, although they did considerably better in mining communities and old Populist strongholds.27 Shortly after the 1912 election a fight broke out when members of the Denver branch took aim at State Secretary A. H. Floaten. An old issue seems to have resurfaced: that Floaten had sold out to the railroad companies by accepting free railway passes. In reporting on the story, The Miners Magazine intoned, “Socialists do not believe that passes from railway corporations to a state secretary are to be taken as proofs of his loyalty to the principles of socialism.”28 Party leaders were also concerned about the loss of membership after the election—from 1912 to 1913 membership dropped from 1,976 to 1,030—and they began to consider ways of retooling the organization so it was something more than one centered around elections and offered enough social and intellectual activities to maintain member interest when there was no election.29
Socialists in neighboring Wyoming had a similar electoral experience in 1912–1913. Debs picked up 6.5 percent of the vote. Herman Groesbeck did a little better, picking up 7 percent in his campaign for a seat on the state supreme court. Going through Rock Springs in 1912, Seidel reported that hundreds of miners had come out to hear him and were very enthusiastic.30 Returns suggest relatively high levels of support in mining areas. From a growth perspective, however, the future did not look particularly bright. Wyoming remained a state where Socialists attracted relatively few voters beyond their membership base. The party had 685 members, a relatively large number when we account for population, but it only attracted 2,760 votes for the ticket (see Appendix, Table 6).
In most of the remaining states in the region, the election results were more impressive. Montana Socialists were in a good mood going into the 1912 election because of the apparent success of Mayor Lewis Duncan’s regime in Butte. The voters of Montana gave Debs close to 14 percent of the vote, compared with around 9 percent four years earlier. Duncan ran as the Socialist candidate for governor and received more votes than Debs, the only Socialist to do so. Socialist candidates throughout the state in 1912, though, generally trailed far behind Progressive party candidates as the third-party choice. They also suffered some hostility. In Butte, for example, election day was marred by a riot. According to an IWW source, a ruffian mob, “filled with patriotism and cheap whiskey” and led by an “insane woman,” set things off when they attacked a crowd of Socialists waiting for election returns.31 Buoyed by successes at the polls in municipal elections, membership in the Montana Socialist party increased from a low of 200 in 1910 to more than 1,600 in 1912 (about a quarter of whom were in Butte), before dropping back a little in 1913. The party remained strong with miners but had made gains with farmers. Indeed, according to one estimate, 40 percent of the party membership in 1913 was composed of farmers or people in small farming communities.32 The party, though, had severe competition for this vote from the NPL.
The Socialist vote in Idaho in 1912 rose as high as 14 percent for some candidates. Debs got over 11 percent of the vote that year. The party drew much of its support from the Democratic party.33 In relatively revolutionary-minded Shoshone County the party suffered from the national party’s attack on the left wing, especially Haywood’s expulsion, but still received 16 percent of the vote. Outside the mining areas the Idaho party, like the Montana party, aimed for and apparently tapped into some of the discontent among farmers.34 In 1912 the party also took a stab at increasing the women’s vote. Party leaders later concluded, though, that the addition of women to the electorate had little effect on the Socialist vote.35
Overall, however, the Idaho party was relatively healthy in 1912, with, as State Secretary I. F. Stewart reported, around 1,800 members in 120 locals.36 Following the 1912 election, the editor of an Idaho paper backing the Progressive party concluded, “The Socialists have come to be an important figure to be reckoned [with] within Idaho politics.” He warned that supporting the Progressive party was the only way to arrest the drift toward Socialism.37 Also concerned about Socialist success, conservative forces began a counter-education campaign. Following the lead of conservatives in other parts of the country, they brought noted anti-Socialist lecturer David Goldstein of Boston to talk about “Socialism in Its Relation to Religion and to the Christian Family.” Speaking to a Boise audience, Goldstein contended, among other things, that the Socialist party stood for free love and atheism. Contrary to what Socialists believed, said Goldstein, Christ “was not an agitator, a rebel, nor the waver of a red flag.” Socialists in his audience interrupted him throughout the evening, often hissing at his statements. After the meeting some followed Goldstein down the street, yelling at him.38 The enthusiasm evident in Idaho in 1912 largely disappeared the following year, as membership dropped from 1,667 to 818 (Appendix, Table 3).
Leaders of the national Socialist party felt that Nevada, a state with about 20,000 voters scattered over 100,000 square miles, could be carried for Debs and sent dozens of prominent Socialist speakers and hundreds of thousands of pieces of literature to the state in 1912. Rallies were held in places like Tonopah, where a large Socialist audience gathered at the Nevada Theater to hear J. Stitt Wilson and a variety of local leaders who occupied seats on a stage profusely decorated with American flags and pictures of Debs, Seidel, and Abraham Lincoln.39 Party leaders boasted of thirty-seven locals and 1,042 members who represented every county in the state.40 To some extent the Socialist campaign in Nevada had been furthered by Governor Tasker Oddie. Oddie, elected in 1910, continued his predecessors’ push for reform in regard to railroad assessment and other matters but helped keep radicalism alive by alienating labor through the use of troops. He backed workmen’s compensation legislation and favored basic safety laws but had no sympathy for labor and strike activity, especially when conducted by foreign miners. His decision to use troops and the state police in the fall of 1912 against striking Greek Western Federation of Miners members at Ely and McGill apparently inflamed workers and helped the Socialist ticket.41
In November Debs wound up with 17 percent of the Nevada vote, his best showing in the nation.42 He received over 30 percent of the vote in Nye County, the state’s mining center where Manhattan, Round Mountain, and Tonopah were located. The Socialist vote in Tonopah in 1912 increased from 159 four years earlier to 508 and was larger than that for any other party—Democrat, Republican, or Progressive.43 In 1912 Harry Dunseath, a native of England who had held a variety of occupations including prospector and Wells Fargo stage driver, was elected police judge in Tonopah. He soon became famous throughout the state in his capacity as coroner for blaming mine operators for the many mining deaths and injuries. As the Socialists saw it, he “made it too expensive for the mines to kill and injure their employees.”44 With continued organizing efforts, Nevada Socialists suffered less of a letdown than Socialists in 1913, and, indeed, the party seemed well on its way toward forcing a fusion with the Democrats similar to the earlier Silver-Democratic merger that had dominated state politics.45
To some extent, the Nevada party had succeeded in rallying several groups—among which miners, railway workers, and reclamation-land farmers stood out—behind a moderate multifaceted reform program.46 More negatively, one of their opponents, U.S. Senator Key Pittman, wrote in reference to the Nevada Socialists: “That party is not seeking reform; it is simply seeking power.”47 If so, it seemed to be moving in the right direction.
In Utah, the euphoric feelings resulting from the 1912 elections were shortlived. Party secretary P. J. Holt reported in April 1912 that the party had experienced a growth in average membership from 263 in 1910 to 611 in 1911 and, with the aid of a full-time organizer, was giving out a lot of literature and sending speakers everywhere. He also noted that the party had added a newspaper at Helper, Utah, and was planning to establish a chain of newspapers under central management throughout the state. Holt declared, “The general condition of the party in this state is excellent.” He went on: “As to how many votes we will get, that is immaterial. What we want is organization and education. Nor do we expect to have a perfect organization composed of angels, but rather to spread the propaganda to every nook and corner in the state and let the internal development of intelligent membership follow. To that end we will discourage all possibilities of factionalities and sometimes brush technicalities to one side for the sake of unity.”48
In a sharp departure from the past, solidarity seemed to catch on among the various Utah Socialist locals as they pulled together through the state party to make a major effort to get the Socialist message out to the voters. Coming into the 1912 election, national organizer J. L. Engdahl reported that Socialists were carving out a foothold among Mormons in Utah; some Mormon elders were even serving on the Executive Committee of the Utah party. The party too, he noted, had picked up additional support among miners, particularly in Bingham Canyon where an industrial struggle had led to increased worker solidarity (Chapter 13), and had showed evidence of strength in several recent local elections.49
With the continued support of organized labor, the Utah Socialist candidate for governor that year, a medical doctor, Frank McHugh, received nearly 8 percent of the vote (compared with 4.5 percent in 1908), running just slightly behind Debs. Debs received 8,899 votes, also around 8 percent of the vote. Socialist Murray E. King did better, getting 8,971 votes, 8.7 percent of the total, in his bid for the state’s only seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, just edging out the Progressive candidate for third place. Newspapers, including the church-friendly Deseret News, congratulated the Socialists on their improved showing.50
Yet, while 1912 was encouraging, a year later party membership had dropped from 1,667 to 818. For many, the atmosphere had become more repressive. Reporting on the situation in 1913, a party leader declared: “Here in Utah Capitalism is supreme. Socialist speakers are denied the use of public buildings. To be a Socialist in a Utah coal camp is to be jobless if a miner; if you are a rancher it means your products will be boycotted.”51 In 1913 the party still had the support of the Utah Federation of Labor.52 After 1913, however, the federation discontinued its endorsement in an effort to enhance its ability to work with candidates of the major parties. Utah radicals continued to be at each others’ throats. Even Christian Socialist Bishop Franklin Spencer Spaulding got caught up in the turmoil, booed in 1913 by Wobblies in the audience for a speech he gave at Socialist party headquarters in Salt Lake City after saying it was wrong to favor direct action over political action.53
The 1912 presidential election in New Mexico and Arizona was exciting because it was the first national election in those places. In June 1912, New Mexico state secretary Lurlyne Layne noted that the party was still small in number—around 400 members in fifty locals scattered throughout the state—but, as she saw it, it was filled with people “who have no idea what the word quit means.”54 Still, New Mexico had organizational problems. Many of the locals were composed of farmers scattered over a large land area, a situation that made it difficult to arrange meetings. In those places counties were used as the basic organizational unit, with local branches as needed.55 To bring the scattered Socialists together, the party sponsored several encampments and brought in lecturers such as Kate Richards O’Hare and P. G. Zimmerman from Texas for these events. Along with miners and farmers, there were indications that the party had hidden support among workers on the Santa Fe Railroad. One “John Doe” letter writer disclosed: “I have worked on the New Mexico division of the Santa Fe for some time, and know personally many good socialists, both among the organized and the unorganized workers. . . . As a rule the unorganized employees on the Santa Fe and especially if they have a family to support, keep their views on politics and unionism very much to themselves, for there is no telling when you might be talking to a ‘spotter’ on the Santa Fe.”56
In 1912 the New Mexico party nearly doubled its percentage of the vote over 1911, from around 3 percent to 6 percent. In its first real burst into the limelight in 1911–1912, the party continued to do particularly well in the southeastern part of the state. One of the party’s future leaders, W. C. Tharp, came from that area. He had moved to the town of St. Vrain in Curry County in the early 1900s as a schoolteacher and later established what in 1912 was the only Socialist paper in the state, The St. Vrain Journal. State Secretary Layne declared: “W.C. Tharp is a full-fledged Revolutionary Socialist, whose editorials give forth no uncertain sounds, and his paper deserves the enthusiastic support of all Socialists in New Mexico.”57
By early 1912 the party’s national committeeman for Arizona was happy to report that most of the comrades who had been “deceived by the self-seeking leaders” of the Labor party “had come back into the fold.”58 The party and locals around the state were also throwing themselves into various causes, sometimes with surprising effectiveness. Arizona Socialists, for example, showed political muscle in a matter involving Socialist Miss Emma Hiatt, a schoolmistress in the Prescott Groom Creek District. On January 3, 1912, the county superintendent of schools, C. W. Persons, sent this directive to Miss Hiatt: “I hereby order you to cease singing socialist songs, to stop all political talk and teaching which includes your talks on economies, in your school work, and to remove all red flags from the school building where you are teaching. Complaint has come to me that the law was being violated in this respect and upon investigation I find same to be true.”59 Persons put Hiatt’s salary on hold until she made the changes. Socialists protested that all she had done was to have students sing “songs whose burden was the brotherhood of man.” They also said she was not responsible for the red flag; it was left on the building by Socialists who had recently used the schoolhouse as a meeting place. Hiatt asked to have her salary reinstated, but Persons refused. Persons, a Republican, had gained his position through an appointment and was planning to seek election to a full term. Socialists considered nominating Hiatt to run against Persons for the office. As perhaps intended, the threat frightened the Democrats, who had their eye on capturing the position. To head off a candidacy that would drain votes from their candidate, the Democrats nominated a candidate friendly to Hiatt who made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, “she could teach her children what she liked.”60 The Democrat was elected, Hiatt was retained as a teacher, and, for a time at least, her students sang Socialist songs.
In January 1912 members of the regenerated party were deeply involved in the creation of the Arizona Federation of Labor, which grew out of a Phoenix convention attended by delegates from forty unions. Presiding over the convention was E. B. Simanton, a miner from Globe and candidate for the U.S. Senate on the Arizona Socialist party ticket. While the organization’s constitution did not endorse the Socialist party, it had endorsed Socialism with the adoption of a clause in the preamble: “We demand the enactment of laws establishing the collective ownership by the people of all means of production and distribution.”61 Throughout the early 1910s, ties were strong between the Arizona Socialist party and the Arizona Federation of Labor. Socialists were especially strong in the union movement in mining areas scattered around the state.62 Yet the mining camps were not a safe haven. In 1912 W. S. Bradford, secretary of the Arizona party, noted, “In a number of the larger camps to be known as an active Socialist is equivalent to prompt dismissal.”63
The first presidential election in the state, and the candidacy of Eugene Debs, who carried his campaign to Arizona in 1912, greatly stimulated Arizona Socialists. Party workers campaigned enthusiastically on Debs’s behalf throughout the state. They also campaigned for A. Charles Smith of Douglas, candidate for Congress, described as a “fluent talker and gentleman” in the mainstream press.64 As the Socialist campaigners saw it, they were educating the voters rather than saying whatever was necessary to secure votes. They assumed that once the people became informed about the Socialist program, the party would not have to worry about getting votes.65
Debs received 13 percent of the Arizona presidential vote in 1912, easily doubling the party’s previous high and outdistancing William Howard Taft. The Socialist candidate for the House of Representatives, the only other office up for election in 1912, did equally well, suggesting a level of party support that went beyond support for Debs. Following this burst of strength, Arizona Socialists saw themselves in the mainstream of reform and witnessed a “rising tide of socialism” in the state.66 Indeed, the possibility of this happening was noted in the mainstream press. Both Democratic and Republican editors called attention to the threat of Socialism and offered their parties as the only safe alternative. As far as Progressive Democrats were concerned, the best way to head off the rising tide was to purge their ranks of reactionaries and provide needed reforms.67 To some extent, this was done. Over the next several years the strength of the Socialist party was undoubtedly reduced by the appeal of the Progressive wing of the Democratic party. Several prominent Socialists became Democrats, and a number of Socialists appeared to have registered Democratic to vote in that party’s primary for candidates such as George W.P. Hunt.
Socialist leaders were clearly no match for the highly visible Hunt in competing for the votes of left-wing workers. Hunt spoke their language. For example, in a speech delivered before a very enthusiastic crowd in Bisbee on July 4, 1913—a speech printed in its entirety in Miners Magazine—Hunt spoke out against the privileged classes’ attempts to rule and exploit the masses and the evils of “greed backed by power.” He referred also to the “grinding oppression of the masses” in the modern industrial system and demanded “that labor, which possesses all wealth and makes possible every comfort of life . . . have a greater share of what it creates, and that privilege shall no longer be permitted to seize as much of the profits as its greed dictates.” Hunt called for “Progressive democracy,” which to him meant
that this country, its institutions, its resources and its rewards for industry belong to the people whose labor makes them possible. Progressive politics is the faithful application of Thomas Jefferson’s equal rights to all and special privileges to none. . . . Progressive politics aims to make industry bring comforts for the homes of the working multitude, as it does now in an unequal degree for the homes of the privilege[d]. . . . Progressive politics challenges the theory that privilege and monopoly make whatever prosperity we enjoy, and insists that fair and equal prosperity for all is the only sure safeguard of a free government.68
Working largely below the radar screen, Socialists in Arizona continued to be engaged in a variety of activities. In 1913, for example, Socialists in Phoenix threw themselves into a number of issues growing out of a strike against the Phoenix Street Railway Company, owned by outsiders living in Los Angeles who, according to the Socialist press, were abusing their workers and “extracting every cent possible from the people of Phoenix and giving back as little as possible in the way of service.”69 Workers in this conflict locked horns with professional strikebreakers brought in from the Thiel Detective Agency of Los Angeles. Socialists pushed not only for terms favorable to the workers but also for a city takeover of the transit system.
At around the same time, the editors of The Arizona Socialist Bulletin stated one of their major purposes: “We voice the protest of the oppressed who have no medium by means of which they can express their protest and no avenue for securing redress for their wrongs.”70 They followed up by expressing outrage over a variety of matters, including the brutality of Southern Pacific Railroad detectives in their handling of nomadic workers. Socialist editors also demanded the abolition of capital punishment, a movement that, at the time, was gaining momentum in the state. Seeing this as another struggle in the class war, the editors pointed out: “No murderer of any substantial means has ever been legally hung in Arizona. Only murderers who are poor are hung in Arizona.”71 The Arizona crusade to abolish the death penalty also caught the eye of Eugene Debs, who observed in 1913: “The people of Arizona have shown themselves to be so progressive and so entirely abreast of the enlightened spirit of the times in so many other matters that I feel safe in predicting that she will follow the lead of other progressive states and blot this insufferable stigma from her fame.”72
Along with all this activity, Arizona Socialists still found time to fight among themselves, as suggested by an item in the July 11, 1913, issue of The Arizona Socialist Bulletin: “Local Yuma has changed its meeting night to Tuesday, and last night was a hummer. Our late secretary, Comrade Matilda C. Milton, resigned a week ago and Comrade Beverford was elected to succeed her. His elevation to the position stirred up all of his fighting blood and he looked around for someone to devour, and in the absence of scabs and capitalists he jumped on Comrade Teufert. For a while it looked bad for Teufert, but the local took his side of the case and handed one to Beverford. . . . If the enemy will not accommodate us we will have to scrap among ourselves just to keep in practice.”73
In 1912 the Mountain West continued to be a region where the Socialist party did relatively well. While Debs received 6 percent of the vote nationally, he received 11 percent of the vote in Idaho, 13 percent in Arizona and Montana, and nearly 17 percent in Nevada. In Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming Debs also received a higher percentage of the vote than he received nationally, and he came close to the national average in New Mexico. Debs ran ahead of Taft in Arizona and Nevada (Appendix, Table 2). Mountain West Socialists had also made aboveaverage use of the Lyceum Lecture Circuit in 1912. When total state population was considered, in 1912 Nevada ranked first, Arizona second, Idaho fourth, Montana sixth, Colorado seventh, Utah eighth, and Wyoming thirteenth among the states in the use of the speakers. Only New Mexico had not gotten involved.74
On the whole, in the Mountain West during this period, Socialists appeared not only relatively numerous and active but a little farther to the left than the party as a whole, although not as much as one might expect and not consistently within the region. The vote on the anti-sabotage amendment at the 1912 national convention provides a rough indicator of where Mountain West Socialist leaders stood in the left-right debate of 1912–1913 and of the divisions among them. A motion supported by the left and opposed by the right to strike the amendment went down 191 to 90, about 68 to 32 percent. Of the 21 delegates from the Mountain West voting on the question, 9 were in favor and 12 were opposed, a division of about 57 to 43 percent. Although a majority of Mountain West delegates rejected the left’s position, they were more supportive of that position than the delegates as a whole. Yet, the various Mountain West delegations did not see eye to eye. All 5 of the Montana delegates voted with the left, while all 5 Colorado delegates took the right wing’s side and voted against the motion. The only other delegation supporting the motion, by a 2 to 1 vote, was Wyoming. The Arizona delegation was evenly split, and delegates in Nevada and New Mexico sided with the right. In Idaho the delegation was split 3 to 1 for the right.75
A better, although far from perfect, indicator of left-right sentiment in the area is provided by the membership vote on Haywood’s removal from the National Executive Committee. Nationwide, around 23,000 Socialists voted, including those whose votes came in after the official cutoff date. This amounted to roughly 20 percent of the party’s members. On this vote, a majority of members from the Mountain West voted for Haywood’s removal, but Haywood still did better in that region than he did nationally. In the Mountain West, 48 percent of members opposed his removal, while only 33 percent did so nationally. Within the region, though, we again find considerable division. Haywood’s supporters were in the majority in Montana, Nevada, and Utah—the percentage of support for Haywood in Montana trailed only that in Texas—but a majority of members in each of the other five states, including Colorado, where he had been the party’s gubernatorial candidate, favored his ouster from the NEC (see Appendix, Table 8).
Soon after the 1912 election, Mountain West party leaders became concerned about membership. Two questions were raised: how to attract those who had supported the party’s candidates in 1912 and how to keep the members the party had. Nationally, party members could account for only 13 percent of the votes going to Debs. In the Mountain West, the percentage was not much higher, although it varied from 9 percent in Utah to 25 percent in Wyoming (see Appendix, Table 6). Still, the size of Debs’s vote raised tantalizing possibilities of membership growth in each of the states. On the other hand, the second problem—how to retain membership levels—became more pressing. Between 1912 and 1913, party membership in the region fell from 8,364 to 5,792—a loss of 2,572 members, or 31 percent of the membership. Nevada and Wyoming had made small gains in membership, but the losses were large elsewhere in the region, particularly in Colorado and Idaho, where membership dropped around 50 percent (Appendix, Table 3). A number of ideas were advanced, including upgrading meetings, doing a better job of educating members as to the party’s historic role, introducing members to more speakers, or giving them activities between elections. Some entrepreneurial types, much to the dismay of their more revolutionary colleagues, thought of offering inducements such as prizes to bring in new members.
Several parties in the area also made strenuous efforts to recruit female members. Among the most successful of these was Nevada, where, according to a 1914 survey, women made up about 33 percent of the party’s membership. In Nevada, a special propaganda effort had been made to recruit women.76 The survey also found the percentage of female members at 13 for Arizona, 10 each for Idaho and Montana, and 5 for Wyoming—figures for Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico were not available. Although the survey was incomplete, the percentage of women party members in the region appeared to compare favorably with percentages in other regions.77 In Wyoming the party secretary reported that several women wanted to run for office as Socialists, but relatively few wanted to be party members—the number of women candidates equaled the number of male candidates on the Socialist ticket, but there were fewer women than men in the party organization.78 Socialists also noted that Idaho was one of the woman suffrage states and that women were actively involved in Socialist activities.79 Still, there were limits to female participation. Anna Maley, who spent much time and energy in the region in 1911 trying to recruit women into the Socialist party, noted: “The women of Idaho and Utah vote, I am told, but so far as I can observe, they are passive political factors. The same deadly conservative influences which hamper our unenfranchised sisters operate here. The women with whom I have contact are housemothers chiefly. They are not active breadwinners. The church, the lodge, the cradle and the kitchen absorb them.”80
Some advocated organized participation in initiative campaigns as a useful outlet and a way of keeping members. Said one activist in Arizona, “By concentrating our campaign upon certain initiative measures we avoid a campaign of personalities and we inaugurate a ‘Do Something’ policy for our organization which will be to our everlasting credit and benefit.”81 For some Socialists, doing something meaningful through the organization also required more flexibility when it came to the policy of nonalignment. In arguing for more flexibility, exasperated Colorado Socialist Mila Tupper Maynard acknowledged in 1910 that “often our essential principles force us to stand in isolation,” but she went on to argue that this was not always the case and that when Socialists could join in fellowship “with our neighbors we should be glad to do so. Prejudices against us are tremendous at best; why add to them when not essential?”82 Maynard, speaking to her colleagues at a national assembly, cited the refusal of Socialists in Denver to join in a cooperative campaign with other groups to secure direct democracy and other reforms, simply because doing so involved working with others, as an example of a more general fear among Socialists “of agreeing with our neighbors on anything.”83 She concluded: “This spirit is all wrong. We should be glad to work in common cause where we can fully endorse a measure and where no organic or political affiliation is required.”84 Most Socialist leaders in the Mountain West, however, continued to insist on the lesson learned from Populism: that the party must retain its purity when it came to affiliation with others, as well as when it came to membership in the party.
Another thing party leaders in the area agreed on was the lack of funds at their disposal. Party leaders constantly bemoaned the financial condition of their organizations. Coming into the election season, they commonly encountered special financial problems such as finding funds to pay the fees necessary to place their candidates on the ballot—those fees were set by lawmakers representing the major parties, and they seemed to increase with the increases in Socialist votes.85 Some asked for aid from the national party, arguing that because of the small size of their states, the chances of winning were greater. Party leaders, though, did not want national interference in their operations. Within the states, issues of control often revolved around party newspapers. State parties that could afford them had their own official newspapers. In some places the party owned the state’s only Socialist paper, thus augmenting its control over the movement and the message it was attempting to get across. Indeed, some organizers saw having such a monopoly to be at the core of state party strength. Many appeared to concur with the view of an Arizona party leader that “[t]he party is in its childhood until it can control its own propaganda organs.”86 Arizona, in 1913, was one of the states where the party owned and controlled the only Socialist paper in the state. A survey conducted by the national party that year found more chaotic situations elsewhere. In Utah, for example, there was no party-owned newspaper, but the state had two highly competitive and contentious privately owned Socialist papers.87 Colorado had a party-owned paper but also four privately owned ones, including one from a group that had recently left the party.88
Over the years, Socialist newspapers in the region came and went with considerable speed, but in several states at any given time the Socialists were without any paper. The Socialists made up for some of this loss through their allies in the union press. The mainstream press, for the most part, felt the best way to deal with the Socialists was to ignore them and “let them get their own publicity.” Much of the publicity coming from the mainstream, often corporate-owned, press was negative, stressing the radical side of Socialism and labor unions and the violent industrial conflicts with which they were associated. Several events of this type were to occur over the period 1914–1916, the popular coverage of which helped set back the movement.